Water and the Ecosphere in the Anthropocene

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue comprises selected papers from the Proceedings of the 5th International Electronic Conference on Water Science (ECWS-5), held from 16 to 30 November 2020 on sciforum.net, an online platform for hosting scholarly e-conferences and discussion groups.

The ECWS-5 was dedicated to Water and the Ecosphere in the Anthropocene (WEA), with attention focused on the water cycle in the ecosphere and its interactions with the different compartments during the Anthropocene. The Earth’s most recent geologic time period is human-influenced, based on overwhelming regional as well as global evidence that atmospheric, pedospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric, and other earth-system compartments and processes are now altered by humans, including a broad range of anthropogenic activities and climatic changes. The ecosphere can be considered to be a global ecosystem integrating all living organisms and their inorganic environments. During the Anthropocene, the ecosphere can be viewed as a global socio-ecosystem that includes the Critical Zone, ecosystems, human societies, and their interactions with the environment. Different aspects of the interactions between water and the ecosphere in the context of global changes were considered at this conference, including water quantity, quality, biology, ecology, sociology, economy, and law.

The ECWS-5 offered a wide range of topics, most of which were related to this WEA scientific domain:

• water interactions with the different compartments of the Critical Zone;
• water resources management and ecosphere resilience and adaptation;
• water and ecosystem functioning and services;
• water and socio-ecosystems;
• integrated modeling of the interactions between water and the ecosphere;
• new sensors, new methods and technologies, and new approaches.

Dr. Jean-Luc Probst
Prof. Dr. Richard C. Smardon
Prof. Dr. Jianzhong Lu
Guest Editors

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